There aren't that many Microsoft employees, it took me a couple minutes to memorize the team.

Of course the majority are from Microsoft, they do seem to merge in a fair amount of PRs from the community though.

Look at the first comment in the PR, it will have a badge "This user is a member of the Microsoft organization". Alternatively, look at the release notes on the website, any non-Microsoft contributions are listed at the bottom.

Right, but how to do that for thousands of PRs to see that there's a bias? I assume it's a ton of work.

Why not sample 20 and see if you can spot a trend?

Because I studied statistics.

You can get the JSON from like,

gh pr list --repo microsoft/vscode --state merged --limit 1000 --json author,mergedAt,title

Then you can do:

jq -r '.[] | [.author.login, .author.name] | @tsv' 1kprs.json | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr

And see there's only 63 authors and > 90% of the merged PRs are from Microsoft (which.. fair, it's their product).

I think the signal is strong enough that you can legitimately reach the same conclusion by mk 1 eyeball.

NOTE: I'm not criticising, it's a Microsoft-driven project and I am fine with that. The _do_ merge things from "random" contributors (yay) but they are overwhelmingly things that a) fix a bug while b) being less than 5 lines of code. If that is your desired contribution then things will go well for you and arguably they do well at accepting such. But they are very unlikely to accept a complex or interesting new feature from an outsider. All of this is seems totally reasonable and expected.